Does this mean that concurrently, the Peace Corps will be tooling around in heavily armed Abrams tanks, just to offset the absurdity? (And note the initials GTE, which represented something a bit more forward-thinking in happier times.)

There’s something Eric Hoffer said: “Intellectuals cannot operate at room temperature.” There always has to be a crisis–some terrible reason why their superior wisdom and virtue must be imposed on the unthinking masses. It doesn’t matter what the crisis is. A hundred years ago it was eugenics. At the time of the first Earth Day a generation ago, the big scare was global cooling, a big ice age. They go from one to the other. It meets their psychological needs and gives them a reason for exercising their power.

After 9/11, global warming became the latest example of that notion; a way for those rather squishy about actually defeating terrorism to have some to get excited about and to provide a distraction from the fight -- recall this Time magazine cover story in 2008, which attempted to equate crippling the economy in the name of global warming with the Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima:

And now the phony-war of the left is joined by a real-life division of our military.

On the other hand, look at the upside. What would Osama bin Laden think of them quitting -- only temporarily one hopes -- the war on terror, whatever it's call this week, to fight global warming?